To The Last Page

One thing you can be sure of in a Jo Spain novel is indeed the uncovering of dirty little secrets, although in her DI Tom Reynolds series the guilty secrets are more likely to be not so little, often revealing a dark side to Irish history and society that has been long kept hidden. Spain’s second standalone novel (after the thrilling The Confession ) gives the author the opportunity to delve into other perhaps more familiar and universally recognisable human motivations that give rise to crime in Dirty Little Secrets , but of course Jo Spain has her own very distinctive take on the subject that opens up other issues related to living in a small isolated community. So many in fact that – like any good crime thriller – there are any number of possible suspects who may have killed Olive Collins. There are only six houses in the exclusive Withered Vale gated community in Wicklow, but it’s taken 3 months for any of the neighbours to notice that Olive has been lying dead and decomposing in N...

Although Alan Parks wrapped up the first Harry McCoy novel well, you could tell that there was unfinished business both personal and professional at the conclusion of Bloody January . Based around a historical case, Parks nonetheless had delved/descended into the murk of gangland violence and police corruption in Glasgow in the 1970s to ensure that there would undoubtedly be more dark corners to dig into further. In February’s Son Alan Parks get down and dirty once again on the mean streets of Glasgow. Unfortunately for Harry McCoy, he has associations with both the police and the gangs that make it difficult to know where his allegiances lie. Obviously with himself above all else, since it’s at least managed to keep him alive this far. That ambiguous quality to the character is what keeps things interesting and provides a broader view of life and crime on the streets, McCoy having to mix with some disreputable and distasteful types and take actions that lie well beyond the remit and ...

There’s a curiously split personality about A. Phillips’ A Preamble to Depravity , the first book in his Electrical Hearts series following the prelude of A Magical Tale With Geek Appeal , a division that perhaps lies within the concept of the work itself. It's essential to maintain a slightly distanced tone, and indeed it can even be seen in the nature of this book’s lead character, Inspector Alexander von Purzeus, an official of the Hapsburg Empire who has a very high opinion of himself and his ‘suprasensual’ powers. The conflict within von Purzeus and his sexual appetites can be identified to some extent by his strange semi-metamorphosis early in the book to bear the head of a lion and the body of a man. For one reason or another, but probably a combination of events involving the ignominious death of a perverted colonel, the suspicious death of a crown prince in Mayerling, and his prominence and notoriety in organising ‘suprasensual’ (sadomasochist) orgies of the utmost depravi...

Like the last DS McAvoy case, Scorched Earth , there’s a lot of joining up of dots to be done in Cold Bones . Since we’re talking about the Humberside police here with Hull as a major shipping and fishing port, that means that those dots can travel to a lot of far-flung places that make them difficult to connect. There’s a particularly difficult geographical and historical connection to be made in the rather grim case (aren’t they all?) that DS Aector McAvoy and his boss Detective Superintendent Trish Pharaoh have to deal with in two separate locations. one in Hull and the other in Iceland, but that’s the least of the obstacles standing in their way. It’s Pharaoh who is doing the long-distance travelling this time, a highly sensitive matter whose details haven’t been shared with anyone on the Humberside force – not her closest friend, colleague and confidante, McAvoy and not even Area Commander David Slattery. A body has been found in a frozen bay that has connections to a suspected se...

There’s no question that the major publishing event of the new French literary season is the new book by Michel Houellebecq, the now aging enfant terrible of the French literary establishment. Immediately upon publication (4th January in France – it’s not available in English translation until September), it attracted considerable press attention even though Houellebecq himself – usually always willing to provide some provocative headlines – was uncharacteristically silent this time. Sérotonine it was said, had predicted the civil unrest that recently manifested on the streets in the form of the gilets jaunes , the yellow vests, as if French civil unrest was something new and unpredictable. It’s true however that Houellebecq has always had his finger on the pulse of French and modern western society, monitoring its irregular heartbeat, waiting perhaps for it to finally just give up and die. Houellebecq’s pessimistic view of the fundamental nature of humanity, his ability to identify ...

Craig Russell is well-known for his dark crime fiction writing, but The Devil Aspect must surely be his more ambitious and entertaining work yet, moving out of detective fiction for an even darker ride through Gothic historical fiction and mythology that takes us from Veles the Slavic God of the Underworld to Jack the Ripper, from the Gates of Hell to the origins of the Holocaust, and later even a little bit further than that. There’s an irresistible dark fascination to The Devil Aspect right from the outset, where a dangerous maniac known as Leather Apron has just killed his fourth victim on the streets of Prague, his methods similar to the Jack the Ripper killings in Whitechapel. In Prague in 1935 however, there almost seems to be an epidemic of madness and mental breakdown on the streets as Dr Vikor Kosárek arrives in the city. He’s about to take up a post as clinical psychiatrist in the Hrad Orlů asylum, a castle with a dark past that currently houses just six inmates. These inma...

Somewhat appropriately Marco Cosimo d’Amico and Laura Iorio’s Heart of Shadows occupies a shadowy region of comic art that isn’t quite so easily defined or categorised. It is a kind of children’s bogeyman tale with a rather storybook feel to the artwork, but it also has a Neil Gaiman-like sensibility for viewing old myths and tales with a rather more modern and enlightened perspective that manages to explore them for darker undercurrents. In Italy L’Uomo Nero (The Man in Black) is the equivalent of the bogeyman in the UK and the USA, the figure of a rather sinister and disturbing nursery rhyme. Unfortunately for Luc, a young French lad, it’s a favourite bedtime rhyme of his Italian grandmother. Nana has already been told off by Luc’s mother, who is particularly sensitive about the issue owing to the disappearance of her daughter Claire 10 years ago. For Luc it means that he is tormented by visions of Uomo Nero leaping out of his closet every night. Actually, pretty much everything fri...